Change, in the person of Barack Obama, is coming to the Middle East this week. It’s coming from a White House determined to break with the past. Putting its foot down on West Bank settlements is just the most visible point of the US-Israel confrontation. Were Mahmoud Abbas still able to command confidence as a representative of the Palestinians, one could say they were close to the finest hour since June 1967; were Binyamin Netanyahu Israel’s only voice, it would be experiencing its moment of greatest anxiety, as one Bush-era assumption after another is overturned by Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell.

But President Abbas is kept in place beyond his term by the West and Israel’s need for a sane Palestinian face to talk to whenever peace talks are resumed. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, et al have declared they would reject any deal Abbas might strike following his US visit last week. Not only is a Palestinian “unity government” — the lack of which makes peace talks pointless — still elusive but it remains just as impossible to make Hamas de jure recognise Israel, without which it won’t be talked to. Meanwhile, a new Palestinian government based in the West Bank was sworn in on May 19, dominated, naturally by the Fatah, and called “illegal”, naturally, by the excluded Hamas.

In Palestinian politics, therefore, little has changed; except that an extensive poll published on May 27 by Birzeit University, near Ramallah, showed that about 37 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza would vote for Abbas’s Fatah right now, as opposed to 23 per cent for Hamas. Collating the figures for both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, it’s 31 per cent for Fatah and just about 17 per cent for Hamas. To the extent that opinion polls are still trusted as at least an exercise in wish-fulfilment, this indicates that Hamas’s self-destructive course may have run itself out.

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